Portrait of an Oldbie

Posted on August 14, 2015by

ventress-sideshowIn my interview series Better Know a Fan, I find people I know outside of the Eleven-ThirtyEight staff who I nevertheless find interesting—either for their unique point of view, their tone, or their overall personality. My subject this time, Tracy Gentile, has already made her stamp on ETE in the form of last year’s guest piece The Case Against Mara Jade Skywalker.

While that piece was without a doubt one of the most controversial things I’ve ever run here, Tracy justified my faith in her both in the article itself and her patient engagement with the intense feedback. To those of us who know her at the Jedi Council Forums as anakinfansince1983, she’s a lively debater whose opinions are nothing if not intense themselves, but like my last two interviewees, I’ve never seen her take an honest disagreement personally or blow it out of proportion. As a member of the original Star Wars generation, after all, Tracy’s got nothing if not an abundance of perspective. Read More

Tsar Wars: The Hapans Strike Back

Posted on August 12, 2015by Aggressive Negotiations, Imperial Court Circular

Hapans-GOI[1]Here’s the third entry in our series on monarchy in Star Wars! On Monday, Bria and I discussed why Star Wars had so many monarchies. On Tuesday, we took a trip to idyllic Naboo and tried to make sense of their political system. Today, we’re visiting the EU and looking at the very strange place (even by Star Wars standards!) known as the Hapan Consortium. We may have had a little too much fun with this one, but we have no regrets.

 

Bria: So you’re going to start this by softly singing ‘Hapes Hapes Hapes’, right?

Jay: I’m not sure what that is, and if I’m singing anything it’s gonna be a Disney song… which is entirely appropriate I think. Although we’re not quite at a matriarchal Disney princess movie yet.

Bria: Someone needs to go back and reread Courtship of Princess Leia.  That’s what all the pretty people are singing when the Hapan delegation arrives to offer Isolder as tribute uhh I mean husband to Princess Leia.

Jay: And here I thought Mon Mothma was selling Leia for the good of the Republic! But honestly, I do need to re-read it. For all the (occasionally justified!) crap CoPL gets, the politics are intriguing.

Bria: Yeah, without CoPL, we never get Hapes or Dathomir or Tenel Ka of House Djo, First of Her Name and Queen Mother of the Hapes Consortium.

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Tsar Wars: Once Upon a Time in a Galaxy Far Far Away

Posted on August 10, 2015by Aggressive Negotiations, Imperial Court Circular

rsz_menace_final_300dpi-970x545[1]

In case you hadn’t noticed, I have a pretty strong interest in royalty and in politics. My passion is shared by my old friend, Bria LaVorgna. Bria and I have decided to co-write a piece on monarchy in Star Wars, presented alternatingly on the sites we write for: Eleven-ThirtyEight and Tosche Station. We think that the close connection Star Wars has to monarchy is pretty unusual and worth examining in detail. We’ll start out with a brief survey of monarchy in Star Wars, before moving on to an examination of how monarchy works on three prominent Star Wars planets.

(Programming note: I’ll update this intro post with links to each piece on Tosche Station and Eleven-ThirtyEight as they go up this week. Look for a new piece each day from now through Thursday!)

Part II: A New Naboo (Tosche Station)
Part III: The Hapans Strike Back (Eleven-ThirtyEight)

 

 

c6256992fe890afeb7825666927b7f0d[1]Unusually among science fiction franchises, Star Wars has a strong attachment to monarchy. This is partly due to the nature of Star Wars as space opera rather than pure science fiction, but it’s not really a genre issue. Monarchy is part of the DNA of Star Wars and always has been. Initially, Princess Leia served as the princess figure in the fairy tale conception of Star Wars (one of many inspirations for Star Wars, including myth, serial adventures, etc.) and Leia proves in the very first film that she’s not merely a damsel in distress. But fairy tale inspirations only get us part of the way — monarchy is a persistent and pervasive part of Star Wars, reflected in the Naboo of the prequel trilogy, Hapes of the Expanded Universe, and a myriad of monarchies in the Clone Wars. In fact, The Clone Wars made such a use of monarchies that worlds that the EU had established as democracies (Mon Calamari) ended up becoming monarchies. George Lucas had a pretty direct hand in The Clone Wars, and he obviously crafted the story of the saga, so monarchy is just a part of his political conception of Star Wars. But the question is — why? Why does a story about the struggle between light and dark, between democracy and tyranny, feature monarchies so centrally?

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Modern Mythmaking, Star Wars Style

Posted on August 7, 2015by

Ziost_citadel_Book_of_SithsThe very essence of a myth is how it is not set in stone. Stories change as they are told and retold, and multiple versions of one story is considered perfectly reasonable. In the present, there are plenty of franchises that are very well-known, stories that almost anyone can recognize a few references from even if they aren’t in the fandom. Star Wars is very much one of those- by now, pretty much everyone has heard a few of the iconic lines, and the main characters and imagery are known worldwide. We can even argue that by now, Star Wars has transcended the “film franchise” status and is now a modern-day myth. It’s not just the prominence of the Star Wars franchise, but the very narrative structure. Even recent developments, like the Legends announcement, actually fit well with the modern-myth status.

The hero’s journey, as described by scholar Joseph Campbell, was one of the most powerful influences on Star Wars, and we have every reason to think that the sequel trilogy will fall into that same pattern. Maybe our hero is going to be Rey this time, but the very pattern of the hero’s journey is probably going to stay intact. If we’re talking about myth-making, maintaining the narrative structure is going to ensure it. It’s simple- an ordinary person gets a call to adventure, and often reluctantly accepts. They go off on a long journey that often includes some very dark times, a somewhat ‘journey through the underworld,’ and eventually emerge triumphant. This is an excellent format for storytelling, and it gives Star Wars a framework that fits its setting perfectly.

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The Force Does Not Throw Dice: Roleplaying and the New Continuity

Posted on August 5, 2015by Six on the Wild Die
The beginnings of our madness
The beginnings of our madness

Welcome to The Force Does Not Throw Dice, a new series of articles where we are going to be exploring the fun world of playing and directing tabletop roleplaying games in the Galaxy Far, Far Away, and where we are planning to impart some sage advice and encouragement to both Game Masters and players. If you’ve never played a Star Wars RPG, keep reading all the same, for our first article is going to have a small discussion on setting and canon. What should the continuity in our campaign be like? Should we discard all official materials or should we try to choose between one of the official portrayals? Hello, I’m Dave and I’ve been directing games for more than twenty years!

Playing in the Star Wars galaxy comes with a few constraints that playing in your own homebrew sci-fi setting doesn’t. First and foremost, there’s the metaplot: Luke Skywalker defeated Darth Vader and saved the galaxy, not your player characters. If you are playing tramp freighter spacers or bounty hunters, that’s probably okay with you, but many groups are used to a more heroic kind of roleplaying and find these restrictions completely unacceptable.

Many gaming groups sidestep this problem by setting their games in an alternate universe, one where their characters can fall in love with Leia and/or Han and be the ones to destroy the Death Star; some other gamers prefer to play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and have their player characters have their adventures in the cracks of the saga (like, I dunno, being the ones to steal the Death Stars plans; hey, there were official precedents!). Some of this last kind of gamers even insist on making their adventures perfectly fit with the “canon” of the saga, bending themselves over to make sure the official word is respected no matter what. Read More